Hail Beerlandia! Bay Area craft brew scene goes full steam ahead

Cindy Cohen clinks glasses with daughter Vivienne, 1, as husband, Fred Cohen, sits across from them at Sunset Reservoir Brewing Co. The restaurant-brewery opened recently on Noriega in the Sunset District.

Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

The Sunset Reservoir Brewing Co. opened on a Wednesday last month on a sleepy block in San Francisco’s avenues. Among other things, it offered eight house-made beers, a big, messy burger and stylish gray walls.

By Saturday night, it was nearly impossible to get through the door, and there was a two-hour wait. Groups of parents, their toddlers temporarily mollified by iPhone videos, spilled onto the sidewalk, their disappointed expressions more bitter than the double IPA being poured inside. Said beer was pouring so fast, it was on its way to running out.

“I didn’t realize we were going to be so consistently busy,” says brewer Aaron Weshnak.

The Bay Area has long been a place that appreciates good beer. For decades, when most of the country had bland, boring lagers, San Francisco had Anchor Steam Brewing Co., as well as the fruits of nearby craft pioneers like North Coast, Sierra Nevada and Bear Republic. What’s happening now is unprecedented: From San Jose to San Francisco, Oakland to Marin, the growth in both the supply and demand of craft beer is exploding.

A good bellwether is February’s annual San Francisco Beer Week. This year, it had 20 percent more events than last year, for a total of 797, with every venue from a historic pinball museum to a dim sum restaurant getting in on the action.

Suds Finder

Meanwhile, the city is on track to nearly double its number of breweries next year (up from 20), with Oakland on a similar trajectory. Taprooms and gastropubs are becoming what sushi bars and cocktail lounges were to the 1990s. And Bay Area brewers are — finally — moving away en masse from ultra-bitter IPAs and exploring more diverse styles.

The result is a local craft beer movement that’s inclusive of people who don’t fit the bearded beer nerd stereotype: light-beer drinkers, women, people who couldn’t care less about Pliny the Younger, or even (gasp!) don’t like hoppy beers. It’s a big tent that’s getting bigger.

Vivian De Anda, 21, with a flight of beer at the Sunset Reservoir Brewing Co.

Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle

In other words, we have become the Republic of Beerlandia.

This beer infatuation isn’t unique to San Francisco, of course. From Oaxaca City, Mexico, to Milan to St. Petersburg, Fla., to Traverse City, Mich., the craft beer revolution is thriving.

Although macro brews like Budweiser still make up the majority of U.S. beer sales, they’re not winning over many new drinkers. Last year, data collected by retail analyst IRI showed that sales of the big U.S. beer brands declined 1 percent, while craft beer climbed 20 percent. According to the Brewer’s Association, the trade group that represents commercial craft brewers, a new brewery opens in the U.S. on average every 16 hours.

These trends suggest that people’s taste in beer is upscaling, much the way it previously did with coffee, chocolate, olive oil and cheese. Remember: Thirty-five years ago, most Americans drank coffee that came in grounds from a big can and tasted like cardboard. Now it’s usually not a question of whole beans versus grounds, but rather which coffee plantation your beans came from. In another few decades, the Bud tall boy may seem as quaintly vintage as a can of Yuban.

“It’s part of this awakening that industrializing the things we put into our bodies is stupid,” says Sayre Piotrkowski, beer director at Hog’s Apothecary, one of Oakland’s top craft beer halls. “But especially beer, which is a more perishable product.”

Fort Point Beer

The front-door view from Fort Point Beer Co. is almost ridiculously postcard-worthy: Crissy Field, the Golden Gate Bridge, blue sky.

Founder Justin Catalana, 29, takes in the scene from inside the almost 2-year-old brewery, a cavernous converted Army barrack. Behind him are banks of gleaming silver tanks pumping out 640 barrels of beer a month.

“Yeah, we could have gone somewhere cheaper,” he admits. “But we wanted to be here.”

Tyler (left) and Justin Catalana at their Fort Point Brewery in the Presidio.

Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle

Catalana started Fort Point with his older brother, Tyler, after having previously opened the Mill Valley Beerworks brewpub. With this new venture, he says, they want to become the “new Anchor.” That is: They want to be on every tap handle in the Bay Area, a recognizable and beloved brand that’s also a city bragging right as surely as Hunter Pence.

Catalana pours samples of Fort Point’s six beers. They’re German-inspired, low-alcohol session beers. Standouts include the pleasantly smoky Manzanita, loosely based on a German Rauchbier; and the bright, refreshing KSA, which stands for Kolsch-style ale.

“We’re not trying to make trophy, showstopping beers,” says Matt Colling, Fort Point’s head of sales and marketing. “Just good eating, drinking beers.”

The move toward more restrained beer styles is one of the most notable aspects of the Bay Area’s current craft beer boom. For the past 15 years, West Coast beer has been dominated by hops, thanks in large part to the success of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the 1980s, and the cult following around the double IPAs (Indian pale ales) created by Russian River Brewing’s Vinnie Cilurzo in the 1990s. Until fairly recently, if you wanted local craft beer at a Bay Area bar, your choices were typically heavily hopped ales from breweries like Bear Republic, Speakeasy or Lagunitas.

Super-hoppy IPAs, reeking of pine and marijuana, almost chewy in their herbaceous and resinous heft, haven’t gone away. But there is now a critical mass of beer lovers to support less bitter styles.

Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery has championed mild, British-style cask ales since it opened in 1997. Now there’s FreeWheel Brewing Co. of Mountain View, making nothing but. Similarly, the Rare Barrel in Berkeley specializes in sour beers, a wine-like style that requires barrel aging. In the past few years, the Bay Area has seen its share of standout examples of other varieties of beer, from fruity-yeasted saisons from San Francisco’s Almanac Beer Co. to excellent Belgian-style beers from Baeltane Brewing in Novato.

And when it comes to double IPAs, the new crop of brewers is striking out to make the style their own. One of the most popular new breweries, San Francisco’s Cellarmaker Brewing Co., is garnering national attention for its relatively austere double IPAs.

Fort Point represents a significant juncture in San Francisco’s beer story: It’s the first real production brewery to open in San Francisco proper since 1997, when Speakeasy Ales & Lagers set up shop in Bayview-Hunters Point. Before that, of breweries still in existence, there was Anchor, which opened 100 years prior.

Other Bay Area producers have been expanding, too. 21st Amendment, which began as a brewpub in SoMa in the ’90s, recently built a $21 million production facility in San Leandro. Magnolia opened a new brewery and attached restaurant, Smokestack BBQ, in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood.

But most new breweries coming online are tiny and probably won’t be hitting supermarket shelves anytime soon — or ever. And maybe that’s OK. Many small brewers talk about wanting to re-create a version of pre-Prohibition America, where scores of tiny breweries made up the fabric of the country’s drinking landscape.

“Beer used to represent where you were from, and not just fancy ingredients and craftsmanship,” says Adam Lamoreaux, founder of Oakland’s Linden Street brewery, who proudly recalls hand-delivering some of the company’s earliest kegs strapped to the front of a custom-made work bike —a draft horse with a kickstand. “The modern brewer is going to have to be comfortable with not dreaming big, but dreaming deep.”

When asked about the future of the city’s brewing landscape, Brian Stechschulte, executive director of the city’s brewing trade group the SF Brewers Guild, rattles off a long list of coming-soons.

“There’s Laughing Monk brewery going into the Bayview; I think they’re going to be a production brewery and taproom. Then Harmonic Brewing Co. in the Dogpatch. Then Drink, Ferment, Repeat — that’s going to be a kind of home-brew incubator place in Portola …”

I interrupt him to ask about a brew pub allegedly opening in Bernal Heights, where I live, and he admits he hasn’t heard of it.

“Honestly,” he sighs, “I’m losing track.”

Tyler Catalana, co-founder of Fort Point Brewery in the Presidio, inspects a cylinder of beer at the brewery.

Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle

Curated brews

Not long ago, beer was an afterthought at most good restaurants, resting somewhere just above soda and 20,000 leagues below wine. Now an increasing number of restaurants, such as Anchor & Hope and Mourad, offer thoughtfully curated local draft selections.

For the true connoisseur, massively stocked taprooms that rival San Francisco’s historic beer go-to, Toronado Pub, have begun multiplying on both sides of San Francisco Bay. These are places where it’s not unusual to see 20 constantly rotating craft beer handles. From Mid-Market’s temple of obscure beers, Mikkeller Bar, to the more down-home Beer Hall near Civic Center, there is plenty of opportunity to explore what’s new and fresh.

In order to offer their customers beer from these small, local breweries, bars and restaurants usually have to go around beer distributors who mostly sell big craft beer like Sierra or macros like Bud. Often the producers themselves deliver the beer, which puts local beer into the same realm as local produce.

Hilary Cherniss, owner of Sunset Reservoir (she also runs the nearby Devil’s Teeth Bakery), says they have no plans to distribute outside the pub. She lives a block away, and says she simply wanted to create a restaurant where she and her three little kids and her friends could come and have a good time and not get, as she put it, “the stink eye.”

“I’m no beer nerd,” she says. “I just love this neighborhood, and I love good food and beer. There was no place for me to go out here.”

Now there is. The revelation is that everybody else wants to be there, too.

Lessley Anderson is a freelance writer in Bernal Heights. She has been writing about beer for a decade, but drinking it far longer. E-mail: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @lessleyanderson